the one thing that the chrome app and the ipad app do that the website does not is give me a one or two sentence blurb on what the article is about. no need to decipher what an article called 'Skin Deep: Someone Just Like Me Said, ‘Buy It’' is about

Six words and one set of scare quotes, all douchey. Would he say '"Word", a word processing program'? Outlook is one of the most used apps in the world. It's even out for Mac, ffs.

And why "program"? Is his house style now to ape newspapers from 1985? It's either a client or an app, though I suspect the style guide has had a douching to ensure "app" only means something that runs on iOS devices.

Pretty sure the only reason Apple may be getting out of the 100 million unit a year music player market is the fact it's not as profitable as making phones, not this guff about a "simpler product lineup".

It would be kind of a ballsy move. Not many people would choose to carry both a music-only device and a phone if the phone offered the same or better functionality. A phone is the thing everybody needs, and it seems like only 50% of people even really care about music at all. Why be in a market people don't care about, when you could spend your efforts dominating one that EVERYONE cares about.

It's like saying that in order to listen to music now, you have to have an iPhone, but that's what you really want anyway.

Carol Bartz, a Year Ago, on Apple’s iAd: ‘That’s Going to Fall Apart for Them’Daring FireballJohn GruberI said we should check back in a year, and here we are. Bartz may well be proven right eventually — it doesn’t seem like iAd is doing great — but as of today iAd is still here and Bartz is out.

Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales ★Deep report by Asjylyn Loder and David Evans for Bloomberg on Koch Industries:

A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs.

But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 991s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels.

Those grass stains filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.

Surely, my mind raced, surely he has more than one pair of those shoes. He could afford to buy the factory that made them. Why wear this grass-stained pair for the keynote, a rare and immeasurably high-profile public appearance? My guess: he didn’t notice, didn’t care. One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.

Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

I’m not sure why this has erupted into such a little blog publishing world scandal. It’s certainly wrong for someone to accept one of these machines and then write about it without disclosing that it was a gift (or a review unit, or whatever you want to call it), but I don’t get why some people are so up in arms about Microsoft giving them out in the first place.